The paper surveys the state of German pension system after a sequence of reforms aimed at achieving long-term sustainability. We argue that the latest reforms have moved pension provision in Germany in principle from a defined benefit to a defined contribution scheme, and that this move has...

Although demographic change leaves pay-as-you-go pension systems unsustainable, reforms, such as a higher pension age, are highly unpopular. This contribution looks into the role of intrinsic motivation as a driver for pension reform acceptance. Theoretical reasoning suggests that this driver...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2004, the German pension authority started to send out annual letters providing detailed and comprehensible information about the pension system...

In this study we use import penetration as a proxy for foreign competition in order to empirically analyze (1) the impact of foreign competition on managerial compensation, (2) differences in the impact between Germany and the U.S. and (3) whether the impact of import penetration is driven by...

Im Oktober 1998 befragte das ZEW rund 250 Finanzexperten aus Banken, Versicherungen, Kapitalanlagegesellschaften und großen Industrieunternehmen nach ihren Empfehlungen zur Gestaltung eines Vermögensportfolios zur Altersvorsorge. Dieses Papier untersucht in einem ersten Schritt, ob in...

Im langfristigen Zeithorizont der kapitalgedeckten Altersvorsorge kommt Kostenunterschieden zwischen verschiedenen Anlageformen große Bedeutung zu. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde das Kostenniveau von Rentenversicherungen und Investmentsparplänen, deren Guthaben bei Fälligkeit in eine...

The aim of this study is the analysis of so called socially responsible investments (SRI). First, the performance of SRI equity investment funds and equity indices is investigated using Jensen's alpha as performance measure. The analysis considers market timing strategies of the fund management...

We study the performance of conditional asset pricing models in explaining the German cross-section of stock returns. Our test assets are portfolios sorted by size and book-to-market as in the paper by Fama and French (1993). Our results show that the empirical performance of the Capital Asset...

Using data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and from official statistics, I study whether natives are less supportive of state help for the unemployed in regions where the share of foreigners among the unemployed is high. Unlike previous studies, I use...

This paper follows up recent work on the relationship between (un-)employment and wage effects of social security financing undertaken by the OECD Jobs Study. Based on a simple macroeconometric model of the labour market, I investigate whether the peculiar OECD results for Germany on the...